‘Didn’t I?’ said Anne, playing along.
‘He wasn’t incontinent?’ asked David.
‘No,’ said Anne.
‘Or worse, in his case, flirtatious?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘He was just being himself,’ Nicholas suggested.
‘That might have done it,’ said Anne, ‘but it was more than that.’
‘The desire to pass on information is like a hunger, and sometimes it is the curiosity, sometimes the indifference, of others that arouses it,’ said Victor pompously.
‘OK, OK,’ said Anne, to save Victor from the silence that might well follow his pronouncement. ‘Now it’s not going to seem like that big a deal to you sophisticated types,’ she added demurely. ‘But when I took a clean shirt of his up to his room, I found a bunch of terrible magazines. Not just pornography, much much worse. Of course I wasn’t going to ask him to leave. What he reads is his own affair, but he came back and was so rude about my being in his room, when I was only there to take back his lousy shirt, that I kind of lost my temper.’
‘Good for you,’ said Eleanor timidly.
‘What sort of magazines exactly?’ asked Nicholas, sitting back and crossing his legs.
‘I wish you’d confiscated them,’ giggled Bridget.
‘Oh, just awful,’ said Anne. ‘Crucifixion. All kinds of animal stuff.’
‘God, how hilarious,’ said Nicholas. ‘Vijay rises in my estimation.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ said Anne. ‘Well, you should have seen the look on the poor pig’s face.’
Victor was a little uneasy. ‘The obscure ethics of our relations to the animal kingdom,’ he chuckled.
‘We kill them when we feel like it,’ said David crisply, ‘nothing very obscure about that.’
‘Ethics is not the study of what we do, my dear David, but what we ought to do,’ said Victor.
‘That’s why it’s such a waste of time, old boy,’ said Nicholas cheerfully.
‘Why do you think it’s superior to be amoral?’ Anne asked Nicholas.
‘It’s not a question of being superior,’ he said, exposing his cavernous nostrils to Anne, ‘it just springs from a desire not to be a bore or a prig.’
‘Everything about Nicholas is superior,’ said David, ‘and even if he were a bore or a prig, I’m sure he would be a superior one.’
‘Thank you, David,’ said Nicholas with determined complacency.
‘Only in the English language,’ said Victor, ‘can one be “a bore”, like being a lawyer or a pastry cook, making boredom into a profession – in other languages a person is simply boring, a temporary state of affairs. The question is, I suppose, whether this points to a greater intolerance towards boring people, or an especially intense quality of boredom among the English.’
It’s because you’re such a bunch of boring old farts, thought Bridget.
Yvette took away the soup plates and closed the door behind her. The candles flickered, and the painted peasants came alive again for a moment.
‘What one aims for,’ said David, ‘is ennui.’
‘Of course,’ said Anne, ‘it’s more than just French for our old friend boredom. It’s boredom plus money, or boredom plus arrogance. It’s I-find-everything-boring, therefore I’m fascinating. But it doesn’t seem to occur to people that you can’t have a world picture and then not be part of it.’
There was a moment of silence while Yvette came back carrying a large platter of roast veal and vegetables.
‘Darling,’ said David to Eleanor, ‘what a marvellous memory you have to be able to duplicate the dinner you gave Anne and Victor last time they were here.’
‘Oh, God, how awful,’ said Eleanor. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Talking of animal ethics,’ said Nicholas, ‘I gather that Gerald Frogmore shot more birds last year than anyone in England. Not bad for a chap in a wheelchair.’
‘Maybe he doesn’t like to see things move about freely,’ said Anne. She immediately felt the excitement of half wishing she had not made this remark.
‘You’re not anti-blood sports?’ asked Nicholas, with an unspoken ‘on top of everything else’.
‘How could I be?’ asked Anne. ‘It’s a middle-class prejudice based on envy. Have I got that right?’
‘Well, I wasn’t going to say so,’ said Nicholas, ‘but you put it so much better than I could possibly hope to…’
‘Do you despise people from the middle classes?’ Anne asked.
‘I don’t despise people from the middle classes, on the contrary, the further from them, the better,’ said Nicholas, shooting one of his cuffs. ‘It’s people in the middle classes that disgust me.’
‘Can middle-class people be from the middle class in your sense?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Nicholas generously, ‘Victor is an outstanding case.’
Victor smiled to show that he was enjoying himself.
‘It’s easier for girls, of course,’ Nicholas continued. ‘Marriage is such a blessing, hoisting women from dreary backgrounds into a wider world.’ He glanced at Bridget. ‘All a chap can really do, unless he’s the sort of queer who spends his whole time writing postcards to people who might need a spare man, is to toe the line. And be thoroughly charming and well informed,’ he added, with a reassuring smile for Victor.
‘Nicholas, of course, is an expert,’ David intervened, ‘having personally raised several women from the gutter.’
‘At considerable expense,’ Nicholas agreed.
‘The cost of being dragged into the gutter was even higher, wouldn’t you say, Nicholas?’ said David, reminding Nicholas of his political humiliation. ‘Either way, the gutter seems to be where you feel at home.’
‘Cor blimey, guv,’ said Nicholas in his comical cockney voice. ‘When you’ve gorn down the drain like wot I ’ave, the gutter looks like a bed o’ roses.’
Eleanor still found it inexplicable that the best English manners contained such a high proportion of outright rudeness and gladiatorial combat. She knew that David abused this licence, but she also knew how ‘boring’ it was to interfere with the exercise of unkindness. When David reminded someone of their weaknesses and failures she was torn between a desire to save the victim, whose feelings she adopted as her own, and an equally strong desire not to be accused of spoiling a game. The more she thought about this conflict, the more tightly it trapped her. She would never know what to say because whatever she said would be wrong.
Eleanor thought about her stepfather barking at her mother across the wastes of English silver, French furniture, and Chinese vases that helped to prevent him from becoming physically violent. This dwarfish and impotent French duke had dedicated his life to the idea that civilization had died in 1789. He nonetheless accepted a ten per cent cut from the dealers who sold pre-revolutionary antiques to his wife. He had forced Mary to sell her mother’s Monets and Bonnards on the ground that they were examples of a decadent art that would never really matter. To him, Mary was the least valuable object in the fastidious museums they inhabited, and when eventually he bullied her to death he felt that he had eliminated the last trace of modernity from his life except, of course, for the enormous income that now came to him from the sales of a dry-cleaning fluid made in Ohio.
Eleanor had watched her mother’s persecution with the same vivid silence as she experienced in the face of her own gradual disintegration tonight. Although she was not a cruel person, she remembered being helpless with laughter watching her stepfather, by then suffering from Parkinson’s disease, lift a forkful of peas, only to find the fork empty by the time it reached his mouth. Yet she had never told him how much she hated him. She had not spoken then, and she would not speak now.